DIOXIN DETOXIFICATION CAMPAIGN EXPOSED

A remarkable front-page story in the WALL STREET JOURNAL February
20 confirmed that the paper and chlorine industries have waged a
successful two-year campaign to bamboozle the nation's media
about the toxicity of dioxin, and that U.S. Environmental
Protection (EPA) fell for it too.

The point of the campaign was to salvage the paper industry,
which uses 15% of all the chemical industry's chlorine output,
and which is facing billions of dollars in lawsuits brought by
citizens claiming damages from dioxin released from paper mills.

The JOURNAL's story ("How Two Industries Created a Fresh Spin on
the Dioxin Debate") by Chicago-based staffer Jeff Bailey,
describes a bald-faced campaign by the American Paper Institute
(API) and the Chlorine Institute to "revisit" the scientific
evidence that dioxin is a potent carcinogen.

The JOURNAL says, "The paper industry scored its first major
public-relations success in 1990, when paper companies arranged
to challenge the findings of the most influential dioxin study
ever done. That study, reported in 1978 by Richard Kociba, a Dow
Chemical Co. pathologist, was done on 485 white rats, whose food
was spiked with dioxin. Dr. Kociba found a strong link to cancer:
a daily dose of billionths of a gram led to tumors."

To counteract the Kociba study, API hired five pathologists and
brought them to a Maryland Lab in March, 1990, where for two days
they reviewed Dr. Kociba's rat slides under a microscope. The
pathologists voted on each slide--were they looking at a cancer
tumor or at a "benign" tumor? At the end of the two days, they
had voted for 50% fewer cancer tumors than Dr. Kociba had
observed 12 years earlier. Robert A. Squire, the pathologist who
oversaw the recount, told the JOURNAL, "There was't much
unanimity. This was an uncertain finding."

Nevertheless API managed to ignore the uncertainties. Based on
its "new evidence" that dioxin is less potent than previously
believed, API wrote stern letters to the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA), to President Bush's science adviser, and to
William Reilly, chief of EPA. API told EPA, "All of the Agency's
analyses are now out of date in light of the significant new
evidence showing that the risks of dioxin has been overstated."

The JOURNAL does not say so, but almost immediately the API's
publicity machine began cranking out the "news" that dioxin was
no longer considered very dangerous. May 31, 1990 the WASHINGTON
POST (pg. A3) surprised the world with the headline, "Scientists
Temper Views on Cancer-Causing Potential of Dioxin." The story,
by Malcolm Gladwell, said, "Dioxin--the chemical that forced the
evacuation of Love Canal, sparked a wave of lawsuits over Agent
Orange and became notorious as the most potent carcinogen ever
tested--may be far less dangerous than previously imagined,
according to new scientific evidence." Gladwell went on, "Enough
experts have joined the revisionist chorus that some scientists
consider a softening of the government's stance toward the
chemical inevitable." Gladwell's "chorus" consisted of quotations
from four scientists. Gladwell neglected to mention that three of
them were consultants paid by the paper industry.

With the WASHINGTON POST on board, the "detoxify dioxin" campaign
was rolling.

The JOURNAL goes on: "Next the Chlorine Institute... arranged to
bring three dozen of the world's foremost experts on dioxin to a
conference at the Banbury Center [on Long Island in October,
1990]." The JOURNAL continues, "Also present was George L. Carlo,
a scientist but not widely regarded as a dioxin expert...."
"Carlo is not a scientist with a long history of dioxin
credentials," Dr. George Lucier of the National Institutes of
Environmental Health Sciences told the JOURNAL. The JOURNAL goes
on: "Why was Carlo there? Though described as a 'conference
participant' by the Chlorine Institute, he was actually the
industry's $150-an-hour observer. Based on his account, the
institute would later circulate reports that the scientists had
reached an important consensus...."

Carlo's account, which the Chlorine Institute immediately
circulated widely to journalists and to state regulatory
officials, said that the scientists at Banbury had reached
consensus that dioxin does no harm until a certain threshold of
exposure is reached. In other words, Carlo claimed--and the
Chlorine Institute sent out press statements claiming--that the
Banbury meeting had reached agreement that there is some amount
of dioxin that is safe. The JOURNAL continues, "The institute's
statement, however, didn't accurately reflect what had happened
at the conference....A Chlorine Institute official concedes its
representations about the conference were a 'botched publicity
effort.' The institute now agrees there was no conference
consensus on whether a dioxin threshold exists."

However, before the world had a chance to learn that the Chlorine
Institute was playing fast and loose with the facts, the
Institute's disinformation about Banbury was fed to William
Reilly, chief of EPA, who fell for it. Citing the Banbury
"consensus," in early 1991 Reilly ordered his scientific staff to
officially "reassess" the toxicity of dioxin.

The paper industry got help from other friends in high places. In
May, 1991, a highly-placed federal health official just three
years shy of retirement announced that dioxin was much less toxic
than previously believed. Dr. Vernon Houk, Director of the Center
for Environmental Health and Injury Control, announced that he
believed dioxin was only "a weak carcinogen." Houk's statements
formed the "news hook" that allowed the NEW YORK TIMES to climb
on board with its own page-one story August 15, 1991: "U.S.
Officials Say Dangers of Dioxin Were Exaggerated." With the POST,
the TIMES, Houk and Reilly all speaking with one voice, the
"detoxify dioxin" campaign was clearly succeeding.

But with the publication of the WALL STREET JOURNAL's story Feb.
20, the campaign has come unraveled. The scientist in charge of
EPA's reassessment, Peter Preuss, is quoted in the JOURNAL saying
that Vernon Houk's statements "misled" the public about the
dangers of dioxin. Other scientists on EPA's reassessment team
say dioxin seems to be just the tip of a nasty iceberg--that
other chemicals in the environment seem to share dioxin's ability
to interfere with the human reproductive and immune systems. If
we all carry dioxin in our bodies at an average of 7 ppt [parts
per trillion], when you add furans and PCBs [polychlorinated
biphenyls], our average body burden of "dioxin equivalents" may
be as high as 100 ppt.[1] This is not good news. And it means
that any additional dioxins or furans added to the environment
would worsen a situation that it already unacceptable from a
public health perspective. Knowing this, anyone who intentionally
emits dioxins into the environment seems like a logical target
for a barrage of lawsuits.

It is now clear that dioxin lawsuits can devastate an industry.
For example, the WALL STREET JOURNAL reported February 7, 1992
(pg. A5), that the Georgia-Pacific Co.--a major paper
producer--recently lost two dioxin lawsuits in which juries
awarded $4.2 million to residents living downstream of its paper
mill on the Leaf River in New Augusta, Mississippi.
Georgia-Pacific has been named in 159 additional lawsuits filed
by 8209 plaintiffs who claim they suffered emotional harm after
eating fish contaminated with dioxins from the Georgia-Pacific
Plant. Furthermore, according to the JOURNAL, Georgia-Pacific's
insurance carriers say their policies don't cover damages in
lawsuits like these. Georgia-Pacific has now sued Aetna Life &
Casualty and seven other insurance companies in Mississippi
federal court asking a judge to force the insurance carriers to
pay. No matter how that lawsuit comes out, someone is likely to
have to pay tens, or perhaps hundreds, of millions of
dollars--and this represents the problems of only one mill owned
by one company.

As the JOURNAL commented, "Other paper companies are likely
taking note of Georgia-Pacific's setbacks. International Paper
Co. and Champion International Corp. are among those who faced
similar suits." Likely they are.

Other industries are also likely watching the paper's industry's
dioxin troubles proliferate.

For example, cement kilns don't produce dioxin in substantial
amounts until they start burning hazardous waste as a fuel, which
many kilns have recently started doing. It is interesting to note
reports that George Carlo has recently been hired as a consultant
by a trade association representing the cement kiln industry.

When will dioxin lawsuits against cement kilns and against
municipal solid waste incinerators begin? And how big will the
jury awards be in these cases? When your community is deciding
whether to install a solid waste incinerator,[2] or whether to
tolerate a cement kiln seeking permission to burn hazardous
waste, ask your community leaders, "Have you been reading the
WALL STREET JOURNAL lately?"
--Peter Montague, Ph.D.